Search Results for Tag: Tenjing Sherpa

The fog is clearing. The climbers mentioned in my last blog post have spoken. For days, the false report had been tenacious that Tenjing (mostly called “Tenji”) Sherpa and Lakpa Dendi Sherpa were the only mountaineers this season to climb Everest without bottled oxygen. “I think the confusion arose because Sherpa Dendi radio ahead of us on the summit to say we had all made it,” Jon Griffith, Tenjing’s British rope partner, wrote in a comment to my article on Facebook. “Given that Tenji was attempting a no O2 climb and given that radio comms is pretty poor from the summit I suspect that Base Camp assumed that he had climbed without O2 and hence the rumour spread.”

The good weather window in the Himalayas is impressively long. Since this spring’s first ascent of Mount Everest on 13 May by the Sherpa team that had fixed the ropes up to the summit on the south side of the mountain, climbers have reached the highest point at 8,850 meters day after day. Several hundred summit successes have since been counted. Today, Tenjing Sherpa also succeeded, without bottled oxygen. The 26-year-old wants to climb directly afterwards the neighboring eight-thousander Lhotse, if conditions allow it. According to Iswari Poudel, managing director of the expedition organizer “Himalayan Guides”, Lakpa Dendi Sherpa, just like Tenjing, reached the summit without breathing mask today. It was already Lakpa’s third (!) Everest ascent this season, Poudel said.

The base camps on both sides of Mount Everest are slowly but surely filling up. For the Nepalese south side, the government in Kathmandu has issued around 275 permits to foreign climbers. The route through the Khumbu Icefall has been already completed. Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, expedition leader and head of the Nepalese operator “Imagine”, is enthusiastic about the work of the “Icefall Doctors”: “The route to Camp 1 is best so far. They used to experience ladders in more than 20 places but this year it is only in three different places with two ladders joined maximum.” As the 32-year-old informed on Facebook, there are still two big crevasses between Camp 1 at about 6,000 meters and Camp 2 at 6,400 meters to be crossed. “It is expected to have at least three to five ladders joined.”